“After probably spending too long early in his term trying to negotiate with Republicans, he’s in the other extreme, where he has no interest in trying to negotiate anything,” Ryan Lizza says of President Obama. Lizza joins fellow staff writer Jeffrey Toobin and host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to talk about Obama’s new approach to executive power in the face of a hostile Congress. They discuss the negotiations to avoid a Homeland Security shutdown, the use of the Administrative Procedures Act to halt the President’s executive action on immigration, and the significance of the upcoming Supreme Court case challenging the Affordable Care Act, King v. Burwell.

“The knitting together of Republican Party ideology and Netanyahu’s ideology, Netanyahu’s political interests, has been absolute, and it’s been the case for years,” says David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, on this week’s Political Scene podcast.

On this month’s Poetry Podcast, Rowan Ricardo Phillips reads and discusses “Feel Free,” by the Irish poet Nick Laird. In the roving three-part poem, Laird addresses his son and daughter. “It seems as though the poem is everywhere,” Phillips says, “but by the time you get to near the end . . . you realize all the time you’ve been right there beside the sleeping children.”

“There just isn’t the political will and the leverage to enforce a ceasefire,” the New Yorker staff writer George Packer says of the war in eastern Ukraine. “Without that reality on the ground, whatever is put on paper—a thirteen-point protocol in Minsk—sounds something like a fantasy of Hollywood. It’s just evanescent.”

The New Yorker recently said farewell to its office in Times Square, and moved to a new home at 1 World Trade Center. In the magazine, Nick Paumgarten wrote of the “shrine of exotic booze,” the “Cornell-box assemblage of promotional doodads,” and other keepsakes that were uncovered while the magazine’s staff purged and packed. On Out Loud, he joins Amelia Lester, the executive editor of newyorker.com, and Emily Nussbaum, the magazine’s TV critic, to discuss the strange items that turned up while they sorted through their old offices, the challenges of writing at work, and the special place that offices occupy in modern culture.

“Where is my child’s liberty if she is made sick by the freedom of someone else not to be vaccinated?” says the New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter about the politics of falling inoculation numbers. Specter joins fellow staff writer Ryan Lizza and host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to discuss the anti-vaccination movement and American hostility to science.

In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, researchers explored the therapeutic effects of LSD on alcoholism, depression, and a number of other conditions. Then the counterculture came along, LSD became a recreational drug, and the research dried up. In this week’s magazine, Michael Pollan writes about a new wave of researchers who are using hallucinogenic drugs to help terminally ill cancer patients cope with the fear of death.

On this month’s fiction podcast, Antonya Nelson reads Tom Drury’s “Accident at the Sugar Beet,” which appeared in the magazine in 1992 and later became part of Drury’s novel “The End of Vandalism.” The story follows Louise Darling, a resident of a small Midwestern town, through a series of dryly funny encounters with neighbors and friends, and sees her begin a romantic relationship with Dan Norman, the county sheriff. Along the way, she experiences small moments of grief and uncertainty, as when she looks in a bathroom mirror at a bar and suddenly feels “as if she had strayed far from the people she understood. On the other hand, she lived within twelve miles of where she was born.”